MY COUSIN THE BEAST

 
My cousin Brian Kent is a beast. He didn’t get his beastliness from me — or my side of the family. Brian’s dad (my uncle Bob) married into the family and was a brawler. Uncle Bob had a bashed-up nose from fighting. Uncle Bob used to crash weddings in the 1940s to pick up girls, like at the Cleveland Jewish Center on East 105th Street and the Temple on the Heights on Mayfield Road in Cleveland Heights. Both high-class shuls. Bob, who was a proste yid from Kinsman Road, got around.

He joined the army. He claimed he wanted to fight for Israel in the Haganah after WWII, but that never happened. He wound up in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, in 1949, studying art. He ultimately became an art-education professor.

But we’re not here to talk about Bob. Brian the beast . . . Brian, his wife, Deborah, and I recently biked around Cleveland. On our bike trek, Brian biked down 12 steps at Case Western Reserve University. He biked down the steps, instead of walking the bike down the steps. Brian is no teenager. He’s 65. Later, Brian fell off his bike downtown and got right back up.

Brian Kent out west, 2025. (He lives in Connecticut)

I was the bike tour guide. Starting in Cleveland Heights, we headed toward Lake Erie, via the Cultural Gardens (East Boulevard). We planned on eating lunch at the Marina-at-55^th Street. We were going to get walleye. But the lakefront restaurant doesn’t exist. Ripped down. And I had checked the restaurant’s website, which said it was “open.” So we settled on the Siam Café at East 40th Street and St. Clair Avenue. We saw the former mayor in there. (Had to google his name. Frank Jackson.)

We biked to League Park in the Hough neighborhood. The baseball museum was closed. Hough looked pretty good, actually. Babe Ruth hit his 511th home run at League Park.

We biked past John Hay High, where Brian’s mother (my aunt Celeste Zalk) had gone to high school in the 1940s. Secretarial track.

Returning to the Heights, we stopped at a secret waterfall, which I can’t tell you about, and went to Shaker Square to see how run-down it is.

Brian said the highlights of the trip were the waterfall and the tasty lunch at the Siam Café. For me, the highlight was watching Brian bike down 12 stairs.

Beast.